If I had to put it as simple as I can:
Bitcoin’s system is the codification of a particular set of individual rights, and there are political ideologies whose foundation is built upon the direct violation of those rights.
Therefore, Bitcoin is naturally at odds with those promoting its opposing principles, or those who wish to violate the rules, implied morality, and universality that #Bitcoin enforces.
I have never felt the claim that 'Bitcoin is not political' to be appropriate.
Bitcoin is fiercely political. At the most fundamental level.
Bitcoin was an act of protest against corrupt financial institutions. That’s inherently political but I would argue that the core position is one that all ends of the political spectrum can get behind. Nothing about the way it works is exclusive of one set of values vs another.
I think you’re taking some liberties with the substance of the bitcoin white paper. The product is aimed squarely at disintermediating financial institutions and enabling trustless peer to peer transactions. The whole “individual rights” thing is a narrative that was ascribed after the fact—as righteous as it sounds. Bitcoin is a new model for payment rails and storage of personal wealth, that’s it. Beyond that, it is exactly what the end user decides it is.
Decentralized & permissionless storage of personal wealth makes it impossible to "eat the rich" or to tax via inflation which is necessary for UBI & other forms of endless govt spending.
Socialists who "support bitcoin" are extremely suspect IMO. Socialism's central pillar is the abolition of money and replacing it with fiat. As in, orders from the - whatever variety is preferred, a council, a union, a computer model, that replaces the function of money as a regulator of production.
Non-socialist with a economics degree here. Fiat money is not a socialist concept. It’s a facet of all manner of modern economies. The central pillar of socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, which in practice results in the direct intervention by the government in all aspects of the economy. Control over monetary policy and issuance is not a hard requirement for a socialist state to function; the state would simply adapt to their lack of control over money supply by exerting control in other areas.
I doubt that a socialist government would not take over the mint. Lenin famously said that a socialist system must debase the money to deflect the people's attention towards the State.
Fiat money is just corporate vouchers. That's also why the laws of these modern governments, which are all fundamentally socialist, are called "statutes" which is the legal term for rules of a corporation, that apply to its employees.
That’s actually not what Lenin said at all. The quote was, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency,” and that quote was falsely attributed to Lenin by none other than John Maynard Keynes. Taken at face value—if Lenin had indeed originated it—that could even be seen as an argument *against* inflationary monetary policy, in alignment with the views of many bitcoiners.
Also, I’m not saying that a socialist state would not capture the mint of given the opportunity. Any government would do so. The point is that if it are impossible for a socialist state to control the money supply, it would not necessarily render the state powerless.
Well, I think there was some more wrinkles to the Lenin quote and that's pretty hilarious that Keynes is considered to be the grandfather of modern state finance and he essentially said that it was communism. The Communist Manifesto states that a central bank is one of the 10 planks also.
Money is designed to empower the users, so it's quite moot. Sneaking it across borders is why compact is one of the features that defines monies.
In the initial setup of socialist states, there was no real concept of bank wires. The modern socialism is using this to eliminate money (as in portable cash) by licensure over the banks, who must comply with the company policy, I mean statutes. In this way they hope to be able to use the money as a control system rather than lubricant and communication system for production.
We all know where this central control ends up though, no amount of new gadgets and doodads is going to change the result.
